Copyright and Fair Use

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A healthy copyright system must balance the need to provide strong economic incentives through exclusive rights with the need to protect important public interests like free speech and expression. Fair use is foundational to that balance. It's role is to prevent copyright from stifling the creativity it is supposed to foster, and from imposing other burdens that would inhibit rather than promote the creation and spread of knowledge and learning.

The Fair Use Project (FUP) was founded in 2006 to provide legal support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom and protect important public rights. It is the only organization in the country dedicated specifically to providing free and comprehensive legal representation to authors, filmmakers, artists, musicians and other content creators who face unmerited copyright claims, or other improper restrictions on their expressive interests. The FUP has litigated important cases across the country, and in the Supreme Court of the United States, and worked with scores of filmmakers and other content creators to secure the unimpeded release of their work.

Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights.

Martin Husovec is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tilburg (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society & Tilburg Law and Economics Center). He is also a IMPRS-CI Doctoral Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society (CIS) and Impact Litigator at European Information Society Institute (EISi), an independent non-profit organization based in Slovakia focusing on the overlap of technology, law & society.

David S. Levine is an Associate Professor of Law at Elon University School of Law and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School (CIS). He is also the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM (Stanford University), an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show for which he has recorded over 190 interviews since May 2006. Hearsay Culture was named as a top five podcast in the ABA's Blawg 100 of 2008 and can be found at http://hearsayculture.com.

Ryan is a cooperating attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. Since starting his law practice over 10 years ago, he has been collaborating with clients to create and implement effective strategies to litigate over, or negotiate, sophisticated technology and media transactions. Before starting his practice in 2016, Ryan was an antitrust and securities litigator at Milberg LLP in New York City and a legal consultant to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.

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Block chain technology is taking the world by storm. From banking to health care, many tout block chain and the bit coin it enables as a cure-all. Others think bit coin is heading towards the edge. In between are those who see practical applications of block chain but caution on addiction to bit coin. On February 26th at the University of Copenhagen, I made a presentation entitled "Block chain technology -- good, bad, or somewhere in between?" This entry gives you a sneak preview of that talk.

The Fourth Circuit has issued its decision in BMG v. Cox. In case you haven’t been following the ins and outs of the suit, BMG sued Cox in 2014 alleging that the broadband provider was secondarily liable for its subscribers’ infringing file-sharing activity. In 2015, the trial court held that Cox was ineligible as a matter of law for the safe harbor in section 512(a) of the DMCA because it had failed to reasonably implement a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat infringers, as required by section 512(i). In 2016, a jury returned a $25M verdict for BMG, finding Cox liable for willful contributory infringement but not for vicarious infringement. Following the trial, Cox appealed both the safe harbor eligibility determination and the court’s jury instructions concerning the elements of contributory infringement. In a mixed result for Cox, the Fourth Circuit last week affirmed the court’s holding that Cox was ineligible for safe harbor, but remanded the case for retrial because the judge’s instructions to the jury understated the intent requirement for contributory infringement in a way that could have affected the jury’s verdict.

Popularity doesn't equal truth. And yet Facebook's recent proposal to rank the trustworthiness of news sources based on popularity is loosely equating truth with popularity. In so doing, Facebook may be putting form over function.

Hollywood studios, led by Universal, have sued TickBox TV in federal district court in California, bringing their campaign against set-top box (STB) piracy stateside after a big win earlier this year in the EU. Last spring, the Dutch film and recording industry trade association BREIN prevailed in copyright litigation against the distributor of a STB called the Filmspeler. The CJEU held that the Filmspeler’s distributor, Wullems, directly infringed the plaintiffs’ copyrights—specifically, their right of communication to the public—by selling STBs loaded with software add-ons that provided easy access to infringing programming online. (I blogged about the Filmspeler case here.)

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When someone wants to remove speech from the Internet, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) notice and takedown process can provide the quickest path. This has made copyright law a tempting tool for unscrupulous censors. As content companies push for even more control over what gets posted online, it’s important to remember that any tool used to police copyright will quickly be abused, then adapted, to censor speech more widely.

If trolls don’t face consequences for asserting invalid software patents, then they will continue to shake down productive companies. That is why EFF has filed an amicus brief [PDF] urging the court to uphold fee awards against patent trolls (and their lawyers) when they assert software patents that are clearly invalid under the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v.

Since the enactment of the first safe harbours and liability exemptions for online intermediaries, market conditions have radically changed. Originally, intermediary liability exemptions were introduced to promote an emerging Internet market. Do safe harbours for online intermediaries still serve innovation? Should they be limited or expanded? These critical questions—often tainted by protectionist concerns—define the present intermediary liability conundrum.

This article discusses the proposed introduction in EU law of an obligation for hosting providers to conclude licencing agreements with copyright holders and ensure their functioning by taking effective technological measures—such as content id technologies—to prevent copyright infringement on online platforms.

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Sarah Morris is a well-known multimedia artist and filmmaker. In 2007, she debuted her "Origami" series, 24 paintings in which she reworked, redesigned, and reshaped origami crease patterns on canvas. Several origami artists sued Morris for copyright infringement, arguing Morris had unduly appropriated their allegedly copyrightable origami crease patterns in developing the "Origami" series. The Fair Use Project teamed up with attorneys Bob Clarida and Donn Zaretsky to defend Morris. We briefed the fair use issues on summary judgment.

We filed an amicus brief in the Second Circuit on behalf of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts urging the appeals court to reverse a district court decision that ignored established fair use principles that many artists rely upon in creating their work.

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"“My my personal view is that a lot of the negative reaction was a little bit overblown,” said Daniel Nazer, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on patent reform. “I can certainly see the good arguments for why people would prefer it not to be there,” he said, “but I didn’t see it as outrageous.”"

"As it stands, AIs in the US cannot be awarded copyright for something they have created. The current policy of the US Copyright Office is to reject claims made for works not authored by humans, but the policy is poorly codified. According to Annemarie Bridy, a professor of law at the University of Idaho and an affiliate scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, there’s no actual requirement for human authorship in the US Copyright Act. Nevertheless, the “courts have always assumed that authorship is a human phenomenon,” she says."

"“We’re pleased that the Federal Circuit agreed that the podcasting patent is invalid,” said Daniel Nazer, a staff attorney at the EFF and the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. “We appreciate all the support the podcasting community gave in fighting this bad patent.”"

Thursday, April 16

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""Ideas, before you actually put them to work, are very vulnerable to stealing," said University of California, Hastings law professor Ben Depoorter. "We give protection to someone who can make good on that idea, and put it into a particular application, practice, expression, art form.

The song “Happy Birthday” has a long, litigious history dating back to the 1930s. Every year, people spent millions in royalties to use the song, until a class action lawsuit was brought challenging whether the owner, Warner/Chappell Music, actually owned the copyright it so aggressively enforced. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Tulane School of Law professor specializing in copyright law, discusses the case of “Happy Birthday.”